One breakthrough. Every week. Explained simply.

Researchers at UC Berkeley have created something that shouldn't exist: a colour. Using laser pulses aimed at individual cone cells in the human retina, they produced a visual experience no wavelength of light in nature can replicate. Participants described it as an extraordinary, saturated blue-green — vivid in a way no surface colour could match. They named it "olo."

This isn't a trick of perception or an optical illusion. It's the result of stimulating one type of cone cell — the M-cone — in complete isolation, something the physics of light ordinarily prevents. Your brain has never received this input before. When it does, it produces a colour it has never had to name.